Goal

The goal of the Ganymede Simultaneous Release was the same as last year's goal for Europa: to release N major Eclipse projects at the same time. We are doing this simultaneous release to support the needs of the ecosystem members who integrate Eclipse frameworks into their own software and products. While those product producers naturally accept the ultimate responsibility for their customers' experiences, Ganymede's goal is to eliminate uncertainty about project version numbers, and thus to allow ecosystem members to start their own integration, cross-project, and cross-product testing efforts earlier. Ganymede is about improving the productivity of the developers working on top of Eclipse frameworks by providing a more transparent and predictable development cycle; Ganymede is about developers helping developers serve the whole Eclipse community.

While Ganymede is about the simultaneous release of N projects, it is not a unification of the projects - each project remains a separate open source project operating with its own project leadership, its own committers, and its own project plan.

Projects

The projects that plan to participate in the Ganymede Simultaneous Release are listed below, along with their milestone offsets and their project lead.

Requirements For Participation

Projects that are part of Ganymede agree to abide by the following requirements. Unlike the somewhat lax enforcement of previous years, the EMO will remove projects that do not meet the required constraints.

Must Do

These are required for participation:

The projects must work together. This means that one should be able to load any subset of the Ganymede projects into Eclipse and each of the loaded projects should be able to pass all the same tests as if it had been loaded independently.

Projects must have build process maturity and their own functional project update site - the Ganymede site will reference these sites, not replace them.

Any new (new during Ganymede) third-party plug-ins that are common between projects must be consumed via Orbit; the final Ganymede release will not have duplicate third-party libraries (note that this only applies to identical versions of the libraries; thus if project A requires foo.jar 1.6 and project B uses foo.jar 1.7, that's ok).

All plug-ins (bundles) must use the true bundle form. That is, provide a manifest.mf file, and not rely on the plugin.xml file being 'translated' into a manifest.mf file at initial startup. See bug 130598.

All plug-ins must correctly list their required JVM versions in the manifest.mf. See the wiki page about selecting the correct JVM [1].

Project representatives must attend the planning meetings and conference calls - you have to be involved to be involved. A few misses are ok, but chronic lack of attendance is a no-no.

At least one person from each project must subscribe to cross-project bug inbox, i.e. edit Bugzilla prefs to watch "cross-project.inbox@eclipse.org"

Build team members from each project will provide communication channels: phone, mail, IM, IRC and will be available during to-be-specified crucial integration times

Projects must have stated and demonstrated their intent to join Ganymede by the M4+0 date. Projects do so by adding themselves to the table/list above, by signing off each milestone/RC on the Ganymede/Signoffs page, and by contributing an .sc file to the Ganymede common build.

Projects must have a written ramp down policy by M6+0, linked in the table above. (One of the issues identified with this guideline is that its not so much the ramp down policy of how many votes are needed for each bug fix that we need to be consistent on, but rather the meaning of each of the milestones and release candidates. See Platform 3.4 Endgame plan as a guideline. See also Ganymede Final Daze.)

Projects must have their IP approved (a normal Eclipse requirement) and will follow the Eclipse Legal deadlines to do so. See also bug 220977.

Projects must optimize their update site using pack200 to reduce bandwidth utilization and provide a better update experience for users. Additionally, they should do site digesting.

Projects must use signed plugins using the Eclipse certificate. Exceptions must be authorized by the planning council for technical reasons.

Projects must have use jar'ed plug-ins unless there are technical reasons.

Nested jars should be avoided if possible since it creates problems for projects that has dependencies to such plug-ins. The OSGi runtime is fine with it but the compiler is not able to handle classpaths that contain nested jars.

In case only one nested jar exists, it is often better to expand the contents of that jar into the root folder (i.e. unnest the jar).

If a plug-in contains large files that are frequently used (opened and closed), a jar'ed plug-in might degrade performance significantly since the file must be decompressed each time it is opened.

Should Do

Build reproducibility? Require that projects be buildable by community members. Should be identical bits (but not required). All build assets and documentation in CVS/Subversion.

Non-project-team-members should be able to build each project.

Non-project-team-members should be able to run unit tests on each project.

Source tarballs should be created for Linux distros to build with. <need reference here, on how to do ... Kim :) >

Should have new & noteworthy for each milestone. Should be something readable and usable not just a static list of all the bugs. Corollary: individual new & noteworthy should be linked in to the collective New & Noteworthy.

Encouraged

Could Do

SDKs can be included in the Ganymede update site at the project's discretion. A best practice that was discussed would be a minimum run-time with additional sources and examples can be added via update manager or other features.

Milestones and Release Candidates

These milestone and release candidate dates are based on the dependencies of the projects (we call these the +0, +1, and +2 dependencies). Obviously, if a +0 date slips, then it will cause the +1 and +2 dates to slip; similarly for a +1 slip causing +2 slips. Note that the +0, +1, +2, and +3 dates are roughly equivalent to stable nightly builds in a traditional Eclipse project - each of these partial milestone builds will incorporate more and more of the associated project milestones. The "Release" date is the official M/RC date.

Note: in the following table, RC5 on the 'Ganymede' line does not mean this final build is a release 'candidate' ... it is still to be the 'final build' for this Release ... but 'RC5' is the suggested "target" to have some consistent terminology in Bugzilla, and similar things, to be able to mark things that are different in the final release build than in the RC4 build. [The full word, "Ganymede" doesn't make a very good bugzilla milestone target, since it's a little too inclusive, and "R" (for "Release") is too short. TODO: next year consider "GA" for this final target?]

Hopefully there will not by ANY differences between RC4, and RC5 ... but, some projects may find they have to make doc additions, readme files, etc., so ... this just provides a way that such changes can be consistently marked, tracked, etc., to better keep everyone informed about what might be different between RC4 and the RC5 (the final released code). [Note: it's probably obvious, but this does not mean "RC5" should be part of the final zip file names or anything. those can still be what ever "final" name they would always have.]

Bugs & Feature Requests

Ganymede Builds

A number of utilities have been written to automate the assembly of Callisto '06, Europa '07 and now Ganymede '08 builds. These are available in their own CVS respository. You can find more information about how this is organized and individual project responsibilities for the build on this Ganymede Build page (and old information on the Europa Build page).

The Ganymede Build page is where you go to learn how to add your project to the Ganymede build.

Coordinated Service Releases

On the planning call on 2008/06/02, it was suggested that Wednesday, September 24, 2008 and Wednesday, February 25, 2009 be the Service Release 1 and Service Release 2 dates. See specific band (+0, +1, +2, +3, EPP) & freeze dates below.

It is currently assumed that projects will continue to use the Ganymede/Signoffs page to report status.